Inexorable leftist gibbering from someone somewhere. || "Our press, which you appear to regard as being free ... is the most enslaved and the vilest thing." -- William Cobbett. || “Tridents (sic) are not weapons of mass destruction.” -- Nadine Dorries MP

Thursday, June 04, 2009

James Purnell is a despicable Blairite cunt.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Dyslexia is a myth, says PM Rtringes.

For the most part, members of parliament, regardless of their political views, are not complete idiots or dyed-in-the-wool ideologues convinced of the righteousness of their minority opinions. When they are, such as in the case of Nadine Dorries, they tend to expose themselves, if you'll pardon the expression, and even if not pilloried publicly, tend to become known for the eccentricities.

Few though deign to expose their ignorance quite so forcefully or as weakly as Graham Stringer, who in an article for Manchester Confidential doesn't just suggest that dyslexia is occasionally misdiagnosed or that poor teaching sometimes results in children failing to learn to read or write adequately, but that the entire disorder has in fact been invented by the teaching establishment to cover up for their inability to comprehensively offer Stringer's magic bullet, synthetic phonics, having earlier in the article declared they are no panaceas.

There are two simple reasons for being confident about the false nature of dyslexia. International comparisons and the fact that so called dyslexic children have no more trouble learning to read than other children, if the appropriate teaching methods are used.

If dyslexia really existed then countries as diverse as Nicaragua and South Korea would not have been able to achieve literacy rates of nearly 100%.

There can be no rational reason why this ‘brain disorder’ is of epidemic proportions in Britain but does not appear in South Korea or Nicaragua (it is also pretty damning that according to Professor Julian Elliot there are 28 different definitions of dyslexia).

What languages are primarily spoken and taught in South Korea and Nicaragua? Ah yes, that would be Korean and Spanish. Especially considering that Korean is a completely different system of writing altogether, and consists almost entirely of a phonetic orthography this is about as absurd a comparison as you could possibly make.

Stringer further doesn't help his cause by conflating dyslexia with illiteracy in general. He opens the article with comments about illiteracy and its connection with crime, claiming that 25% of the population in Manchester is "functionally illiterate". Quite where he gets this statistic from in the beginning is a mystery, the closest probably being a Telegraph article from 2006 which claimed that 1 in 6 adults lack the literacy skills of the average 11-year-old. This is substantially different both from complete illiteracy and from dyslexia itself; dyslexia is not simply not being very good at reading or writing, but can also additionally affect speaking and other functions. Dyslexia prevalence is estimated at between 2% and 15% of the population, wildly off his 25% scale, although not far of the Telegraph's 1 in 6. He then further confuses the issue, after his rant about dyslexia not existing, by introducing his "magic bullet" of phonics, by suggesting that that 25% could all be happily reading and writing effectively if only they had been taught properly in the first place. The trial he quotes in West Dunbartonshire has incidentally not just involved teaching synthetic phonics, but also a 10-strand separate intensive intervention policy.

If, instead of suggesting that "dyslexia is a cruel fiction", Stringer had instead wrote, rather more sympathetically, that the common perception of dyslexia is false, or even described it as a myth, as a Dispatches documentary a few years' back did, he would have been on surer ground, as there is certainly disagreement over its exact diagnosis and how to treat it. Instead he's completely confident that there is no such thing, which puts him in a distinct minority of the usual conspiracy theorists and cranks that also still believe that the MMR vaccine causes autism and that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. If Stringer had wrote his rant in the Daily Mail then perhaps you could take it less seriously, considering the space it gives other every day of the week to the latest pseudo-scientific gimmickry. You could also accept it more if Stringer himself wasn't decently educated, but he in fact has a BSc in Chemistry and worked as a chemist before becoming a politician. Consequently, we can rather confidently conclude that Stringer himself is more than something of a cnut.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Scroungers.

My father, Joe, was a miner all his working life and died because of the silicosis (coal dust on his lungs). When he died, at 77, following over 10 years of illness, he left no possessions, no house, no car, and no savings. Nothing.

To read your article (Lawyers made millions from sick miners, 12 December) only surprises me in the amount of money these lawyers took from this government fund. Our mam, Katie, now aged 93, struggled financially after our dad died. It was therefore good news when it seemed that some of this fund would be coming her way. We were initially hopeful at the number of phone calls we received from legal firms, but at the end our mam had to settle for a few hundred pounds. That was disappointing. But to learn that James Beresford took £16m from this fund and his firm removed a total of £115m beggars belief.

I read that the solicitors Beresford and Smith are to be struck off. Good. Pity it wasn't done some time ago. Clearly men such as these have no moral conscience. They cannot possibly understand how men like my father worked for 40 years underground, digging out the coal which kept the nation warm and fuelled, for a pittance. I bet my dad didn't earn in a lifetime what Beresford took in an hour.

Even in death my dad, and thousands of other miners, are still being stuffed by the fat cats. I am assuming that this money will be paid back into the fund and used for what it was intended.Gerard McCabeColne, Lancashire

Quite right. The totally inadequate justice system which sentenced this man to six years in prison just isn't up to scratch. Only when when we, the people, decide who lives and dies will the injustices come to an end.

The closest we get to something approaching sympathy, if not for the man himself but for his offspring and relatives are these:

Thursday, October 02, 2008

Censorship and freedom of speech.

Mirror of Craig Murray's post involving Tim Spicer, which his publishers are unwilling to publish due to legal threats from our old friends Schillings:

October 1, 2008

Censorship and Freedom of Speech

This is the key section from my new book which the publisher is unwilling to publish due to legal threats from Schillings libel lawyers, acting on behalf of the mercenary commander Tim Spicer:

"Peter Penfold was back in the UK. He was interviewed separately. Both Penfold and Spicer were interviewed under caution, as suspects for having broken the arms embargo.

Then, suddenly, Tony Blair intervened. On 11 May 1998, without consulting the FCO, he gave a statement to journalists. Penfold, Blair declared, was "a hero". A dictatorship had been successfully overthrown and democracy restored. Penfold had "Done a superb job in trying to deal with the consequences of the military coup." All this stuff about Security Council Resolutions and sanctions was "an overblown hoo-ha".

I believe this episode is extremely important. In 1998 the country was still starry-eyed about Blair, but with the benefit of hindsight, this intervention points the way towards the disasters of his later years in office. It is extraordinarily wrong for a Prime Minister to declare that a man is a hero, when Customs had questioned him two days earlier under caution over the very matter the Prime Minister is praising. It shows Blair's belief that his judgement stood above the law of the land, something that was to occur again on a much bigger scale when he halted the Serious Fraud Office investigation into British Aerospace's foreign bribes. But of course Blair's contempt for UN security council resolutions on the arms embargo, and the belief that installing democracy by invasion could trump the trivia of international law, prefigures precisely the disaster of Iraq. As with Iraq, Blair was also conveniently ignoring the fact that Sierra Leone was left a mess, with Kabbah in charge of little more than Freetown.

In the FCO we were astonished by Blair's intervention, and deeply puzzled. Where had it come from? It differed completely from Robin Cook's views. Who was drafting this stuff for Blair to the effect that the UN and the law were unimportant? For most of us, this was the very first indication we had of how deep a hold neo-con thinking and military interests had on the Blair circle. It was also my first encounter with the phenomenon of foreign policy being dictated by Alistair Campbell, the Prime Minister's Press Secretary, The military lobby, of course, was working hard to defend Spicer, one of their own.

A few days later Customs and Excise concluded their investigations. A thick dossier, including documentation from the FCO, from the raid on Sandline's offices, and from elsewhere, was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. The Customs and Excise team who had interviewed us told me that the recommendation was that both Spicer and Penfold be prosecuted for breach of the embargo. The dossier was returned to Customs and Excise from the Crown Prosecution Service the very same day it was sent. It was marked, in effect, for no further action. There would be no prosecution. A customs officer told me bitterly that, given the time between the dossier leaving their offices and the time it was returned, allowing time for both deliveries, it could not have been in the CPS more than half an hour. It was a thick dossier. They could not even have read it before turning it down.

I felt sick to my stomach at the decision not to prosecute Spicer and Penfold. So were the customs officers investigating the case; at least two of them called me to commiserate. They had believed they had put together an extremely strong case, and they told me that their submission to the Crown Prosecution Service said so.

The decision not to prosecute in the Sandline case was the first major instance of the corruption of the legal process that was to be a hallmark of the Blair years. Customs and Excise were stunned by it. There is no doubt whatsoever that Spicer and Penfold had worked together to ship weapons to Sierra Leone in breach of UK law. Security Council 1132 had been given effect in British law by an Order in Council. I had never found in the least credible their assertions that they did not know about it. I had personally told Spicer that it would be illegal to ship arms to Sierra Leone, to any side in the conflict. Penfold's claim never to have seen an absolutely key Security Council Resolution about a country to which he was High Commissioner is truly extraordinary.

But even if they did not know, ignorance of the law is famously no defence in England. Who knows what a jury would have made of this sorry tale of greed, hired killers and blood diamonds. But I have no doubt at all - and more importantly nor did the customs officers investigating the case - that there was enough there for a viable prosecution.

The head of the Crown Prosecution Service when it decided not to prosecute was Barbara Mills. Barbara Mills is a very well-connected woman in New Labour circles. She is married to John Mills, a former Labour councillor in Camden. That makes her sister-in-law to Tessa Jowell, the New Labour cabinet minister with a penchant for taking out repeated mortgages on her home, and then paying them off with cash widely alleged to have come from Silvio Berlusconi, the friend and business colleague of her husband David Mills, who according to a BBC documentary by the estimable John Sweeney has created offshore companies for known Camorra and Mafia interests. Tessa Jowell and David Mills were also both Camden Labour Councillors, and are close to Tony Blair. Blair is also a great friend of Berlusconi, despite the numerous criminal allegations against Berlusconi and his long history of political alliances with open fascists. Just to complete the cosy New Labour picture, another brother-in-law of Barbara Mills and Tessa Jowell is Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian.

Did any of those relationships of Barbara Mills, the Director of Public Prosecutions, affect the Crown Prosecution Service's decision not to proceed with the case, and to take that decision in less time than it would have taken them to read the dossier Customs and Excise sent them?

Barbara Mills was to resign as Director of Public Prosecutions later that year after being personally criticised in his judgement by a High Court judge who ruled against the Crown Prosecution Service for continually failing to prosecute over deaths in police custody. That has not stopped the extremely well connected Dame Barbara from being appointed to a string of highly paid public positions since then."

It is infuriating that, Maxwell-style, Spicer (who has made millions from the war in Iraq) is using the prohibitive costs of defending a libel case to intimidate my publisher. The result is that important information I received at first hand, and an account of events to which I am eye-witness, is being repressed, as is an important independent critique of early Blair foreign policy.

I am not currently confident the book will get published at all - I am not prepared to put out anodyne pap, which hides the truth, under my name.

I am not currently confident the book will get published at all - I am not prepared to put out anodyne pap, which hides the truth, under my name.

Unlike Moses and Sullivan, the law lords have taken the view, like the government, that such threats are either a "matter or regret" or a "fact of life". It doesn't matter how outrageous the threats were, how if they had been made by a British citizen that he could have been charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice, as both the attorney general and Robert Wardle followed the correct procedures in deciding to drop the case, the Royal Courts of Justice were wrong in declaring that the initial decision was unlawful.

Legally, this can be understood and accepted. It however frightfully ignores the much larger, bigger picture: that the UK government was to all intents and purposes being blackmailed by one of its supposed allies. That is of course if we accept that the threats were to be followed through, which in itself is by no means clear. Even if the Saudis had withdrawn their counter-terrorism co-operation, all such information is now pooled between the main intelligence agencies, meaning that the CIA for one would have forwarded it on to MI5/6 as a matter of course. To give the impression that this threat was more real than it was, the Saudi ambassador expressly made the statement that "British lives on British streets" were at risk if the inquiry was not dropped. Rather than tell the Saudis to get off their high horse and make clear that due to the separation of powers such an investigation could not be called off by politicians, the government meekly gave in, as Moses and Sullivan initially ruled. Robert Wardle, the director of the SFO, had little choice but to cancel the inquiry, as it was clear if he didn't the politicians, including the attorney general, would go ahead and do so anyway.

It takes a moment to digest exactly what sort of precedent this sets. This ruling more or less means that any foreign power, whether an ally or not, can threaten our national security whether directly or indirectly in any case where one of their citizens or otherwise is being tried or even investigated, and we the citizens can do absolutely nothing to challenge the government if it decides that such threats are serious enough to drop that investigation or trial, as long as they have acted appropriately, as the law lords decided Wardle and Lord Goldsmith had. Say that by some miracle or another that the man accused of murdering Alexander Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi, was captured and to be put on trial. Russia wouldn't even have to necessarily threaten violence to stop the trial, all it would have to do is threaten to sever ties on helping with national security, or to not pass on information it has on terrorist activities, and the government could therefore conclude that as more lives than just one are being threatened, it would be perfectly lawful for the prosecution of Lugovoi to be dropped.

In practice, it's unlikely that such an extreme case would ever occur. No, what instead is apparent here that from the very beginning the government wanted the SFO inquiry into the slush fund dropped, not because the Saudis were making threats, but because BAE themselves wanted it dropped. It's been established time and again that BAE may as well be a nationalised company, such is the power it has over ministers. The Guardian's expose which initially altered the authorities to the slush fund connected with the al-Yamamah deal was severely embarrassing, even if it didn't have New Labour's fingers all over it. It proved what long been suspected: that BAE and the government had provided the Saudis with massive sweeteners so the deal went ahead, potentially over a £1bn in bribes, which enabled Prince Bandar to buy a private jet, and which was also spent on prostitutes, sports cars and yachts among other things. All of this is helped along through massive public subsidy: up to £850m a year. In other words, we are directly funding the Saudi royal family's taste in whores and vehicles, while its people suffer under one of the most authoritarian, discriminatory and corrupt governments in the world. Despite everything else, it really is all about the arms deals and the oil. The government got its way because it realised it could rely on the spurious defence of "national security". Moses and Sullivan didn't fall for that. The law lords don't either, and one of them, Baroness Hale, even made clear that she was very uncomfortable with having to overrule them, but had little legal option other than to.

The government response to the initial ruling, which understandably horrified them, was to completely ignore it except to appeal against it. There doesn't seem to have been any reaction today either. The groups that brought the initial challenge, CAAT and Corner House were far from silent:

This ruling, as if it needed stating again, is far, far more serious than last week's involving Max Mosley. The media however on this case, with the exception of the Guardian or Independent fully supported the government's craven surrender, and will do the same over today's decision. When it personally affects them and their business models they will scream and scream until they're sick; when it potentially means, however spuriously, that "lives are at risk", they jump straight behind the government, and, of course, the money. Such is how democracy in this country works. The rule of law, justice being blind and everything else associated always comes second.

It's already bad enough that you've had the desperate luck to be born into a family of such complete and utter cunts, but being given a name which is going to haunt you long after they've shuffled off this mortal coil (hopefully in the most violent and painful way imaginable) really perhaps ought to open them up beforehand to legal action.

Monday, June 23, 2008

We are ruled over by vermin pt. 94.

Following the last post, sometimes it would be nice if it didn't require the accusation of racism for someone to either be fired or lose their job. According to Jacqui Smith, as long as homosexuals in Iran are discreet, there isn't a "real risk of discovery of, or adverse action against [them]," hence why it's perfectly reasonable to deport those seeking refuge from there back.

It's easy to reminisce and wear rose-tinted spectacles over the Labour party's past, how it was the home of Bevan and Attlee, and even now of those who have since blotted their copy books, such as Peter Hain and Harriet Harman, with their campaigning pasts, but when you compare such past alumni to the utter dregs we're currently dealing with, whether it be Smith, whose only previous job was a teacher, or the likes of Andy Burnham and James Purnell, who don't seem to have any past at all prior to their becoming researchers or employed by other MPs, it's hard not to come across all lachrymose over a party that is now being so unutterably betrayed by its current leaders.

The sheer wrongness of Smith's comment, backed up or not by the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, tells you much about the party's current trajectory. As long as you don't bring any attention to yourself, you know, such as dressing up similarly to Big Gay Al, you'll be fine in Tehran. Don't let the punishments for being caught give you the wrong impression that homosexuality in Iran is frowned up: those 100 lashes for the rubbing of the "thighs and buttocks" are simply the state joining in the fun. After all, who are we to decide where the pleasure ends and the pain begins? As for the death penalty, which is the ultimate sentence for homosexuality, it's not employed very often, so don't worry your pretty little heads about it. We've more important things to worry about, like the next set of figures detailing how many asylum claims were made and how many of those whose claims failed were deported. The Sun and the Daily Mail get rather sniffy if the figures don't fall enough for their liking.

Similarly, it doesn't seem to matter that Smith's comments rather undermine the whole point of the asylum system: that it provides sanctuary for those who do raise their heads above the parapet in nations bordering on totalitarianism, in an attempt to not just improve standards for themselves but for their nation and people as a whole, but who might eventually be forced to leave or face death, imprisonment and torture themselves. You could imagine the outrage if an MDC activist fleeing Zimbabwe now after having his or her family killed was then subsequently told on reaching Britain that they'd have been perfectly all right as long if they'd been discreet in the first place, or would be as long as they didn't bring any attention to themselves upon their return. It's almost reminiscent of the tale of the German communists recounted in Antony Beevor's Berlin who proudly showed their Soviet liberators their party cards which they'd kept hidden since the darkness descended in 1933; that the Ivans then proceeded to rape their wives and daughters despite this might well have made them think that they should have been more discreet also.

New Labour's hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil approach is also remarkably similar to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's own, having famously commented that there are no gay people in Iran. Jacqui Smith would like that too; then they wouldn't come over here demanding sanctuary in the first place. I, like some others, am starting to count the days until this shower of shits are finally thrown out of office. I might then have to start numbering the days until the shower of possibly even worse shits in the Conservatives are subject to the same treatment, but at least the Labour party in the meantime might finally be forced to sort itself out.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

We are ruled over by cu*ts.

Two separate issues that arrive on the same day could not more sum up the possibly permanent damage to civil liberties in this country.

The first, that apparently "calling" a religion devised by a science fiction writer with the sole purpose of enriching himselfa cult is now an offence under the Public Order Act shows the depths to which freedom of speech in this country has now apparently sank. In one way, we shouldn't really be surprised: New Labour, also uniquely made up of individuals who spent their youths demonstrating on causes rather more left-wing than any they now espouse, has done more than any other government in recent memory to dilute the right to protest. Laws meant to deal with stalking have been abused by the police, stop and search powers under section 44 of the Terrorism Act routinely used to harass protesters, and most shamefully of all, the right to protest without prior permission within a mile of parliament barred altogether. In the aftermath of the Danish embassy protests, where a line was clearly crossed, the immediate response of the government was not to instruct the police to intervene in such circumstances, but to propose the banning of the burning of flags, as well as wearing masks on such demos.

All these new laws are less to do with actually stopping protest but with controlling it; they want to know who the trouble-makers are, whether the trouble-makers are entirely peaceful or not. This is why the police now routinely film all protests and take photographs of those on them, all for purely innocent reasons, naturally. It's why the police in London have taken to taking photographs of youths they now stop and search, even if they've done nothing wrong. It's all to add to their databases of potential offenders, don't you know? You don't want crimes to go unsolved do you? What are you, some sort of enemy of the people? We can get you on some technicality for that, surely.

It's that same sort of thinking, the kind of argument which the government knows it can get away with making which shapes the latest database to centralise more or less everything that you've ever done. The Times reports that a new database is being proposed that will collect every email and phone call you make along with the time you spend online all in one place, to replace the native ISP's which currently do the job at the moment. This is about as impracticable an idea as it's possible to imagine, but that doesn't make it any less sinister. As the Register points out, this is the sort of system that would be completely ripe for data-mining and fishing. It's not necessarily the government that we have to worry about from such huge databases, but from those that have access to them. Corporations would pay huge amounts to get a hold of such information, as would those other scum suckers, the tabloids, whom we already know use the other government databases as if they were extensions of their own libraries, with the government happily deciding that there was no need to tighten the penalties for doing so. With our government's brilliant record of losing huge amounts of such data, expecting them to be competent in dealing with the billions upon billions of such records is akin to trusting Nadine Dorries to tell the truth.

As with some much else of the government's attempts to please those demanding that something must be done, it also wouldn't be so bad if the proposals actually would do something to help prevent or cut crime. Instead, keeping the records of those using the internet or phone calls is a joke way of doing so in the 21st century, when so many don't bother to secure their wireless networks enabling anyone to use them free of charge whilst leaving no data trails of themselves via their IP address. More suggestions on how daft this is are offered by comment leavers on Mr Eugenides:

The only ones getting caught out will, as always, be the incompetent and the law-abiding.

Still, if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear, right? Except the government losing all that information, of course. Typically, it's the powerful that gain and the powerless that will be even more at risk from this, just as the Scientologists through glad-handing the police appear capable of ensuring that no protester potentially offends their wonderful and completely legitimate religion. Similarly, if you happen to be wearing a uniform which identifies you as a member of the armed forces, then you too need more protection from anyone who might dare to insult you. As for being shot at in illegal wars, well, that's tough. Priorities? What are they?

We received another unpleasant parcel in the post today. Nasty web sites set up, email account and post bag bombarded, people crawling all over my expenses, which they are entitled and I am very very happy for them to do...

Come now Nadine, let's not mess about with euphemisms, spit out exactly what was in this "unpleasant" parcel. See, the trouble is, when you either lie or be blatantly dishonest, or refuse to apologise to others when you've accused them of things they haven't done, it tends to make it more difficult to believe them when it comes to everything else. As Unity says, incidentally, if there is a moron out there sending Dorries dog shit or something similarly nasty, then don't, because as Dorries is attempting to do with this post, it then blackens everyone who is arguing against her pitiful campaign. It is worth questioning though where these "nasty" web sites are; as far as we're aware there are two that Dorries might claim are "nasty", one set-up to hold comments for her posts when she removed them from her own blog, and one which has now been dead for months. All the rest have been exposing her claims with at times remarkable restraint.

As said, I'm not going to say that Dorries is either making it up or lying about this stuff, but it would make it easier to believe if she provided some evidence beyond just a blog post, or indeed, informed the police of what's been happening.

This is all meant to destabilise or distract me.

I have a very clear message to those who are attempting to do this – back off. You will not stop me, you will not undermine me, you do not scare me. In fact, you make me much more determined than I ever was before. You give me strength.

And then just to rub in how she doesn't care for anyone else's opinion or indeed, the facts themselves, she once again posts the image of Samuel Armas with the doctor Joseph Bruner, lifting the baby's arm and gently putting it back in the womb, not the other way around, as both she and the photographer, Michael Clancy, continue to propogate. It would be difficult for an anaesthetized mother and/or child to move in such a way, but again, this just shows the sort of impervious to reason individual we are dealing with: despite formerly being a nurse, despite attempting to claim that she is arguing on the basis of science, she continues to use the most base pro-life propaganda for her cause.

You can almost understand why someone might send her their dog's defecation, can't you? It would also help if she and the others didn't have such apparent contempt for their opponent's points of view, as Simon Hoggart wrote in his sketch on Tuesday:

Dorries herself reaches for the emotion and expects everyone to listen, and weep along with her at the tragedy of babies being brutally put to death, and then demand action. When someone else does the same thing, her intention is to drown it out. Yet it's us, "the hounds of hell", which are chasing her. Maybe it's actually her conscience trying to tell her something.

Friday, May 09, 2008

The lying lies and dirty secrets of Ms Nadine Dorries MP.

By her own admission, Nadine Dorries MP is a liar. Back in March she presented an known urban myth as an emotional case for why the current abortion limit of 24 weeks should be cut to 20 weeks, and when this was pointed out to her, she responded by making arguments that only exposed her ignorance. Dorries has a long record of never apologising and never admitting that she has made mistakes: last year she accused Ben Goldacre of "a serious breach of parliamentary procedure" after he downloaded information from a parliamentary committee's website which Dorries thought he had obtained from a committee member, something for which she never apologised for and when asked when she was going to do so on her blog she removed the comments sections. She additionally, after accusing Caroline Flint among other MPs of having been "bought by the abortion industry", a claim rejected by the parliamentary standards commission, not only refused to apologise to Flint after she confronted her but crowed about not doing so on her "blog".

Perhaps those organisations might then be surprised to learn that Dorries herself, when a Conservative parliamentary candidate for Hazel Grove, campaigned on a pro-choice platform. It's not clear whether Dorries at the time was in favour of the limit as it stands, or whether it's just another example of her being wholly disingenuous, as she claimed, when questioned on her current views last year on the Spectator website, to favour a 9-week limit, even lower than that of Dobbin. She was also formerly a director of BUPA, one of the companies she now accuses of being part of the "abortion industry".

Unfortunately for Dorries, the shit over her underhand means is likely to hit the fan if not this weekend, then certainly next week. Dorries' website and blog is funded from the incidental expenses provision, the rules of which clearly state that such funds should not be used for campaigning on the behalf of a political party or a personal cause: Dorries' website is chock-full of her doing just that, the most egregious examples her vindictive posts on female pro-choice Labour MPs. A complaint to the commissioner for parliamentary standards is in the offing.

Meanwhile, Dorries has been highly vexed by the latest research published in the British Medical Journal, as reported today in the Grauniad and elsewhere. Like in the Epicure 2 study, this found that while the survival rates of babies born at 24 and 25 weeks is improving, there was no statistical improvement in those born at 23 and 22 weeks. At 23 weeks 18% survived; at 22 weeks none did. Her response to this peer-reviewed study, which completely blows her argument that neo-natal survival rates are increasing out of the water, was to say:

"I think this report insults the intelligence of the public and MPs alike. No improvement in neonatal care in 12 years? Really? So where has all the money that has been pumped into neonatal services gone then?" She called the study "the most desperate piece of tosh produced by the pro-choice lobby."

As BD says, the study actually does show that neonatal care has improved, just at 24 and 25 weeks. As those against lowering the limit have consistently argued, this research backs up the point that the viability threshold has been reached, and that those that have survived at 22 weeks are extremely welcome but overall rare anomalies and blips. They do not support lowering the current limit as it stands.

That though, despite the 20 weeks' campaign's insistence, has never been what they really thought. They want abortion restricted no matter what the science and evidence suggests, and if it takes one step at a time and hiding their real arguments behind pseudo-scientific bluster, so be it. Out of all the MPs that this blog has covered over the last few years, it's safe to say that none (with the exception of dear Tony) has been as underhand, as genuinely unpleasant, manipulative, vindictive and dishonest as both Dorries has been and apparently is. She is both a disgrace to politics as a whole and a liability to the Conservative party. The crushing of her current malignant campaign will be just the first step of the fightback.

And so it continues, in a classic piece of Glenda Slaggery. The author responsible for this bile is Monica Grenfell, who belongs to that special band of bullshit merchants and snake-oil salesmen known as "nutritionists". Like most of them, it appears that she has no actual qualifications (she certainly doesn't mention any on her site) that would justify her genuinely calling herself a "nutritionist", and as nutritionist is not a protected term in this country, unlike dietician, she can call herself one without any potential for backlash, similarly to how "Dr" Gillian McKeith continues to call herself one.

Grenfell says approaching the end:

Teenage girls aren't in danger of falling victim to an epidemic of anorexia - but of obesity.

The much-vaunted size zero of catwalk models is actually a UK size four. How many girls do you know that size?

The number of women in this country who are seriously underweight is minute around one in 70.

Which is probably true. It is however also completely irrelevant. Women's magazines don't, or very, very rarely trumpet women the size of Marshall as role models. Instead they present celebrities and models who one week are getting fat and the next week are too skinny, or at least according to the celeb mags, as the body image that should be aspired too. It's the exact same sort of poison that Grenfell preaches, without the slightest care for how this makes women who don't fit the mould feel. Indeed, if women stopped being concerned about how they're "overweight" as Marshall supposedly is, then Grenfell and her colleagues would be out of a job. They have an interest in continuing to treat those who don't fit their model as "lazy" and "poster models" for ill-health.

All of this though is to again judge and pre-judge by what someone looks like. Coming from someone not renowned for his stunning good-looks, this might be a little twee and self-serving, but it's always what's inside that counts. Compare what Grenfell thinks to what she quotes Marshall as saying:

She talks about the "skinny minnies" she'll be competing against. "All I wanted to do by entering this pageant was to send a message out to young girls that it is fine NOT to be a size zero."

Thursday, April 03, 2008

The pompous windbag shows up - again.

It's a hard life having to traipse from one safe-haven to another, all the while knowing that at any moment a predator drone could come along and blow you into a decent number of pieces, but somehow Ayman al-Zawahiri manages it. In fact, not only can he avoid the Crusader-Zionist alliance's laser guided missiles, but he can answer questions from the jihadist forums at the same time, as yesterday saw al-Qaida's media arm, As-Sahab, release the first part of al-Zawahiri's response to over 100 questions posed to him back in December.

That of course doesn't stop him from being a pompous, self-righteous cowardly windbag who likes the sound of his own voice, but you can't expect everything from the second-in-command of a terrorist organisation. Most of the reports have picked up on Zawahiri's denunication of the United Nations, but that's hardly news. Far more interesting is Zawahiri's typical politicians' response to the question of why al-Qaida, or rather its Iraqi linked arm, the Islamic State of Iraq, massacres dozens of their own people in marketplaces, even if they are ostensibly aimed at killing the Shia:

My reply to Mudarris Jughrafiya is that we haven’t killed the innocents, not in Baghdad, nor in Morocco, nor in Algeria, nor anywhere else. And if there is any innocent who was killed in the Mujahideen’s operations, then it was either an unintentional error, or out of necessity as in cases of al-Tatarrus [taking of human shields by the enemy].

My, that sounds remarkably similar to what politicians and armies say in cases of "collateral damage", doesn't it? Zawahiri elaborates slightly:

Were we insane killers of innocents as the questioner claims, it would be possible for us to kill thousands of them in the crowded markets, but we are confronting the enemies of the Muslim Ummah and targeting them, and it may be the case that during this, an innocent might fall unintentionally or unavoidably, and the Mujahideen have warned repeatedly the Muslims in general that they are in a war with the senior criminals – the Americans and Jews and their allies and agents – and that they must keep away from the places where these enemies gather.

Whoops! Did Zawahiri nearly just "misspeak"? The ISI has killed thousands of "them" in crowded markets, and generally "the Americans and Jews and their allies and agents" don't hang around the bazaars. Al-Qaida's message to Iraqis: keep away from the markets, as you don't know when we might decide that some of the people there are part of the Crusader alliance, who we'll be perfectly justified in killing along with dozens of innocents. Still, I suppose they'll be off to al-Firdaws, right, which means they'll be in a better place. Just dead.

All of which makes the following rather amusing. Both Zawahiri and the supposed leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi (widely believed to actually be Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian jihadi, posing as an Iraqi native to gain more widespread support) have increasingly denounced Hamas for making concessions, namely signing the temporary agreement reached with Fatah that ended the in-fighting between the two last year with both going into a sort-of coalition government, not imposing Sharia law and generally not resisting Israel as fiercely as the brave jihadis leading al-Qaida would. In response to this question, which incidentally doesn't even mention Hamas, Zawahiri rants:

3/1: The questioner I’laamiyyah [Informational] says, “1 – Does the doctor have assurance that those who were killed in the Algeria operations were unbelievers? And what is it that makes legitimate the spilling of the blood of even one Muslim?

I think I have responded to the sister I’laamiyyah’s first question previously. But in turn, I ask her: and what is HAMAS’s justification for killing those whose killing is not permitted from the children in the Israeli colonies with the blessed Qassam rockets which don’t differentiate between a child and an adult, and moreover, perhaps [don’t differentiate] between the Jews and the Arabs and Muslims working in those colonies or in the streets and markets of Occupied Palestine, even though the Shari’ah forbids their killing. I request the sister I’laamiyyah to refer to the eight and ninth chapter of the second part of The Exoneration.

Strictly speaking, Zawahiri is quite right: the Qassam rockets are completely indiscriminate, a waste of time, and achieve nothing but the deaths of more innocents on all sides. Coming however from a man in charge of an organisation which indiscriminately slaughtered individuals from over 90 different nationalities on September the 11th, which has condoned the vicious sectarian tactics in Iraq which have killed thousands, if not tens of thousands, and which whose main weapon of intimidation when they took control of towns in Iraq was to behead those who opposed them and leave the remains out in the open as a warning for others, this is just ever so slightly rich.

One thing As-Sahab clearly doesn't want for is a decent translator. This is just the first part of the release, and included is a 46-page PDF document with the entire audio recording transcribed in perfect grammatical English, without an apparent mistake anywhere in sight. The great shame is that whomever produced it is wasted on translating such bile, such hypocrisy and such irrelevance from a man who apparently seeks martyrdom but instead sends his footsoldiers to attain it for him. When that Hellfire missile does eventually reach Zawahiri, it'll be hard to stifle anything other than pleasure, even if he takes yet more innocents with him.

After all, it's not every day that an attractive woman arrives in Britain. All our domestic equivalents have been thrashed with the ugly stick, and some of them even have skin infections which we can take photographs of and laugh about. Then again, maybe if the editors in this country did notice Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy, perhaps it'd look as if they were thinking with their dicks, and that they might as well meet her husband and tell him without a hint of irony that they want to fuck her. It wouldn't be becoming of highly-trained journalists to act like a bunch of hormonal teenagers that discover after the summer break that they're going to have lessons with a just graduated 20-something and then fall over themselves to crawl to her as much as possible, with the less subtle amongst them even making their feelings clear. Even some of the girls in the class might make unkind comparisons between their new teacher and one of her older colleagues, doing so with all the wit and knowingness associated with adolescence that they accidentally forget to realise that there are four parts to a whole, not three.

Thank goodness our media isn't anything like that. The British press is the best in the world you know.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

I'm not sorry, and I blame Allison Pearson.

Oh look, it's a rather over ripe peach.

When blogging and responding to articles both elsewhere online and in the press, there's always a case for two diametrically opposed responses. Like I did with Kamm's rampant apologia for rendition yesterday, you can fisk hard and fast but do so without peppering it with what might well be valid but also distracting insults and expletives, or you can go the whole hog and just call a cunt a cunt, as Kid in the comments does. I try not to do that too often for a couple of reasons: firstly, because it's not pleasant, the writer probably isn't a cunt however reprehensible their views, and it makes me look like one of the green-ink brigade, even here in the deepest depths of cyberspace, not to mention the deeply misogynistic tones of doing so, even if no such offence is meant, and how it also doesn't really make me feel any better in any case; and secondly, because then when you only rarely do exactly what I've just described, it seems to make the result all the sweeter.

Pearson herself has two children, and it's jolly good that she does, because otherwise she wouldn't be able to make such blasé generalisations about how others should look after theirs. Not content with kicking Shannon's mother while her daughter was and still is missing, Pearson obviously thought that wasn't quite potentially offensive enough. No, she had to go one better: kicking a mother when her daughter has just been raped and murdered. Yeah, I wish I was making this up too.

Fiona MacKeown, the mother of Scarlett Keeling, the 15-year-old girl who was raped and murdered in Goa, seems less like a grieving mother than an avenging tigress.

The dehumanisation therefore sets in immediately. In Pearson's fucked up, microscopic little brain, MacKeown is not someone who wants justice for her daughter's murder, something that the local police appear to have covered up, but rather a vicious creature that is out for vengeance, and more than willing to rip out a few throats in the process. Someone who ought to be supported when at her most vulnerable is instead about to be clobbered by the Daily Mail's latest and worst Glenda Slagg.

With her swishing curtain of grey hair, Fiona is taking on a corrupt local police force which initially denied that her cub had been the victim of foul play.

This is a pretty old cub we're talking about here, considering that Scarlett was 15. Never mind that the analogy is bogus, stretched to complete breaking point, and that MacKeown is instead doing what any relative, regardless of whether she was the mother or not would do if they had the personal strength to do so, in Pearson's grim calculus this is just the beginning in a build up towards far more than dehumanisation.

"If police had taken more interest in previous [suspicious] deaths, then Scarlett might not be dead now," growled Fiona.

Ah, she's growling now. I see, like a cat. How much exactly do you get paid for this you witless, brain-addled fuckbubble?

Maybe so. But isn't there an even better chance that Scarlett would still be alive if her own mother had not abandoned her for several weeks after an argument and recklessly continued her own holiday?

Or perhaps if whoever it was WHO FUCKING KILLED HER hadn't done so she would still be. Scarlett and her mother don't come into this; the entirety of the blame lies with the murderer. But then, how could the murderer resist?

Instead the blonde teenager, as tempting as a ripe peach, was left in the care of a 25-year-old tour guide - a local man she'd only recently met.

As tempting as a ripe peach. In case Pearson hasn't been paying attention, over the last month or so we've seen similar "ripepeaches" who have been killed by men, in at least one of the cases purely for his own warped sexual pleasure. They however weren't excused for their crimes because those they killed were beautiful and therefore apparently asking for it; they were rightly put behind bars for more or less the rest of their lives. They say that the Daily Mail is the most misogynistic newspaper, and with such writers as Pearson, who needs enemies?

I don't know what they call that in globe-trotting hippy circles. Back here on Planet Parent it's known as dereliction of duty.

Jolly good. Perhaps if you have daughters and one of them is subsequently whisked away, you'll not begrudge me the right to blame your fucked up small-minded bourgeois values rather than the person responsible, while adding that your daughter was clearly asking for it because she resembled a plump plum, just ready to be devoured.

Mrs MacKeown is now to be questioned by Goan police for negligence - a tactic she claims is a "disgusting" attempt to "switch the focus" away from their own failings.

If anyone's trying to divert attention away from their own mistakes, I'd say it's Mrs MacKeown.

Oh, what's the fucking point with even bothering to argue against this diatribe? Fuck you Allison, and fuck your paper for printing this despicable rant which simply couldn't want a day longer to be formed in that shell-like wrinkled, busted contraption in the middle of your head that couldn't possibly be described by anyone that has read your prose as a brain.

Scarlett was last seen at 4am in a bar surrounded by several men. Witnesses say she was totally off her head on ecstasy and cocaine.

Surrounded by men? On drugs? Clearly this was another lost child abandoned by her parents and therefore which is eminently explainable to the fuckwitted readers out there in middle England that are no doubt nodding sagely along with your sordid analysis. She doesn't matter because she was clearly a whore, took ILLEGAL SUBSTANCES and was just waiting to be plucked by any man who set eyes on her.

That kind of behaviour would have made her vulnerable in her home town back in Devon, let alone in a culture where Western girls are all too readily viewed as sexually available.

Oh, I see. Not only is it her fault and her mother's fault, but it's also both of their fault for going somewhere where the filthy fucking backward savages just can't wait to get their hands on the succulent white women. Does Pearson really not see just how enormously offensive this is? No, of course she doesn't; she's far too fucking moronic.

Forgive me for being a boringly conventional bourgeois mum, but what the hell were Fiona MacKeown and her partner thinking of taking seven kids on a six-month "dream trip" to India - and then leaving one of them to fend for herself? Why wasn't Scarlett in school studying for her GCSEs?

You know, I'm almost tempted to agree with Pearson. I don't think it's the greatest idea ever to take a 15-year-old out of school for six months at one of the most important times in their school life; then though I remember that this abnormal amoral "conventional bourgeois mum" has just more or less justified a teenager's death because she was very attractive and in a country with a load of darkies that were just bound to want to rape her and murder her. You can take Scarlett's GCSEs which will now never be filled in and poke them right up your arid cunt.

The loss of any child must be a horror beyond imagining. But there is something about Fiona MacKeown that makes me want to scream at the TV.

Why exactly? Because she wants justice for having her pride and joy taken away and because she has been denied it? Or is it because her lifestyle and everything else offend your "conventional bourgeois" values so much that you therefore think that she ought to be kicked and assaulted while she's down?

Not an ounce of doubt or regret seems to weigh on this laid-back woman. She told reporters that she had counted every mark on Scarlett's body.

Similarly, doubtless not a "doubt or regret" will weigh on the fucking harridan bitch that wrote this completely heartless piece. Personally, I hope you fucking choke on your words.

"There were almost 50 bruises and abrasions. She has clearly been battered and assaulted. I feel vindicated."

Vindicated? For crying out loud! Any normal person would be tearing out their own hair with grief and remorse.

And does it not cross your tiny fizzog that perhaps this is exactly her way of responding to that grief and remorse? Many others would have collapsed at the tragedy of their daughter dying after drowning; MacKeown instead questioned that and yes, she has been vindicated. If she hasn't grieved yet, that will doubtless come once she has achieved justice, and not before. My own mother, bless her, has questioned the McCanns because to her mind neither of them had showed enough emotion, and she ought to know, because she lost one son in an accident before I came along. I therefore don't question her on that view, despite my disagreeing with it. None of this however occurs to Pearson, or if it does, she keeps it hidden to instead only keep the most base prejudices out in the open.

Mrs MacKeown says her one consolation is that she's "got some photographs of [Scarlett] having a fabulous time".

She still doesn't get it, does she? Fiona MacKeown is an unrepentant member of the Me Generation, one of those people who would rather be a best mate than a parent.

Again, who the fuck are you Pearson to question what MacKeown is going through or state that she doesn't get it? It's you that doesn't get it; your unbearable cruelty to those going through hell through your column is far worse than any offence that Matthews' mother or MacKeown have ever committed. You're the lowest of the low, a bottom-feeding cunt that uses other people's misery against them and gets paid for doing it. You and the "newspaper" you write for are not just a disgrace to journalism, you're a disgrace to humanity itself.

It's more fun being a friend to your kids and, quite frankly, a lot less hassle.

You don't have to fight daily battles over bedtimes and body piercings. And if you have a row with your "mate" you can storm off, unlike an old-fashioned authority figure who has to weather the storm and stay put always and forever.

Oh my god! Scarlett had body piercings! Someone call the middle-class outrage brigade! Oh wait, they already did. Just what is your point exactly Allison? Do you want MacKeown to come and personally show you how sorry she is for her "mistakes" so that you're sated? I suppose you'd like that, and could write about it. TERRIBLE MOTHER WHO ABANDONED HER DAUGHTER TO DEATH AT HANDS OF EASTERN SAVAGES ON DRUGS SAYS SORRY TO TOP DAILY MAIL COLUMNIST. Read all about it!

This week, John Dunford, head of the Association of Schools and College Leaders, warned that schools are the only moral framework in many children's lives.

With the erosion of traditional family life, parents are no longer giving their offspring basic social skills or a sense of right and wrong.

I'm sorry, what's this got to do with MacKeown and Scarlett? Both seemed to have social skills and a sense of right and wrong; it's only you and the fucking murdering bastard who killed her that don't.

It's a bleak picture that brings to mind W.B. Yeats's great poem about a world where the natural order of things has catastrophically broken down: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned."

Welcome one and all to Daily Mail island, where everything is going to hell, the kids all have body piercings and Allison Pearson knows exactly what the remedy is and how to dispense it. Roll up so you too can have the foot of middle England stamping on your bonce forever.

For parents who are poor and ground down by work, or the lack of it, there may be some excuse. But articulate, middle-class people should know better.

That didn't save Matthews' mother though did it? You assaulted her just as you're attacking MacKeown now. The reality is not that "articulate, middle-class people should know better", but actually those that Allison "even my parents must think I'm the lowest form of cunt" Pearson passes judgement on should know better.

Since Scarlett's brutal killing, Fiona MacKeown has fought for her daughter. Would that she had exercised half that dedication and sense of responsibility while Scarlett was still alive and in need of a mother's care.

Hug your children tight Daily Mail readers, because who knows when you too might be damned in the pages of your favourite newspaper for letting them go off on their own with another adult they trusted. You too can then experience the wrath of the very worst writers that man has ever known, with all their preening, self-centred superiority. How ironic that the newspaper which so rails against nanny statism thinks that every parent other than ones that resemble their own values exactly are the product of their own downfall. If Allison was perhaps a little wet between the ears and trying to impress the thrusting Paul Dacre, this sort of vicious attack on a grieving mother could be justified. As it is, Pearson is either 47 or 48 and at the "peak" of her career. One can't help but conclude with hoping that this typeface executioner falls under a train or something similarly messy and nasty. Then instead of blaming Pearson for being on the tracks her family can perhaps sue the train driver and company.